Elsevier

Research Policy

Volume 37, Issue 10, December 2008, Pages 1865-1883
Research Policy

University-industry knowledge and technology transfer in Switzerland: What university scientists think about co-operation with private enterprises

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2008.07.005Get rights and content

Abstract

This study explores empirically the factors determining the propensity of Swiss science institutions at the level of a single institute or department to get involved in a wide spectrum of knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) activities with private corporations. A main finding is that scientific institutes with a stronger orientation to applied research and/or lower teaching obligations are also stronger inclined to get involved in overall KTT activities. The same is valid for institutes which have already had experience with industry co-operations as reflected by a high share of external funds in an institute's budget. Further, there is no systematic size effect with respect to KTT activities. Institutes of engineering, natural sciences and economics/management are strongly represented among KTT-active institutes. Universities of applied sciences have an above-average propensity to KTT activities.

Introduction

The interaction of business sector and science institutions through the exchange of knowledge and technology has become a central concern not only for applied economics but also for economic policy in the last years.3 In a knowledge economy, science is exerting an increasingly large influence on innovation, especially in fast-growing knowledge-intensive industries. Thus, the extent and intensity of industry–science relationships is considered to be a major factor contributing to high innovation performance, either at the firm-level, industry-level or country-level (see OECD, 2002). Still, fears are also expressed in the literature that the tendency to commercialization of university research may cause universities to neglect basic research and teaching that are their main tasks, especially when commercialization revenues are substituted for public funds.4

Experiences of the USA suggest that research of often publicly financed science institutions and commercialization of research results by private enterprises are compatible goals which reinforce each other, if both sides adopt a long-term perspective (as e.g. in aerospace, computers and telecommunication). However, there is accumulating evidence that many OECD countries are lagging behind in this aspect. The interface between business firms and science institutions, especially universities has to be improved and as a consequence knowledge and technology transfer activities have to be intensified. Also in Switzerland it is asserted by many observers that the industry–science interface is far from being satisfactory (see e.g. Zinkl and Huber, 2003). However, so far there does not exist a comprehensive study on extent, intensity, channels, content, goals, and impediments of KTT activities either on part of the science institutions or the private enterprises in Switzerland.

In accordance to Dosi (1982) we define knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) broadly as follows: knowledge and technology transfer between academic institutions and the business sector is understood as any activities aimed at transferring knowledge or technology that may help either the company or the academic institute – depending on the direction of transfer – to further pursue its activities. This study explores the factors determining the propensity of Swiss science institutions at the level of a single institute or department to get involved in knowledge and technology transfer activities with private corporations in order to provide firms with scientific knowledge in research fields which are relevant for their own innovation activities, collect practical experience for students and university staff as well as test the applicability of new research results. We are especially interested in the different forms of this transfer, not only through joint research projects but also through training, mobility of academic personnel, jointly supervised master theses and PhDs, consulting and so on. We hope that our analysis will cast some light on the industry–science interface problem addressed to above. Moreover, we also study the determinants of three important channels of technology transfer activities—patenting, licensing and the founding of spin-offs. As it is meanwhile widely recognized, these are not the most important interaction forms between universities and enterprises but they have been intensively investigated in many studies of universities in the USA (see Agrawal and Henderson, 2002).

The data used in this study were collected in the course of a survey among institutes of all three types of science institutions in Switzerland (federal institutions, cantonal universities and regional universities of applied sciences) using a questionnaire.

A main finding is that scientific institutes with a stronger orientation to applied research and/or lower teaching obligations are also stronger inclined to get involved in overall KTT activities. The same is valid for institutes which have already had experience with industry co-operations as reflected by a high share of external funds in an institute's budget. Further, there is no systematic size effect with respect to KTT activities. Institutes of engineering, natural sciences and economics/management are strongly represented among KTT-active institutes. Universities of applied sciences have an above-average propensity to KTT activities.

The new elements that this paper adds to empirical literature are, first, the analysis at the level of institute or department of a wide spectrum of KTT activities covering not only research co-operation agreements between firms and science institutions but also informal informational contacts, various educational activities, joint use of technical infrastructure and consulting. Although such additional activities seem to be an important part of KTT activities, they have been neglected in most studies mostly due to lack of data. A second element is the explicit consideration of a series of relevant motives and obstacles as determinants of KTT which contribute significantly to the econometric explanation of a scientific institute's propensity to overall KTT activities as well as to several specific forms of KTT activities. A third element is the parallel investigation of the three important channels of KTT, namely patenting, licensing and formation of spin-offs. This is to our knowledge the first Swiss institute-level study on this matter.5

The structure of the paper is as follows: in Section 2 we discuss briefly the theoretical background of the study. Section 3 reviews the empirical literature. In Section 4 we present our data and in Section 5 some interesting descriptive results. In Section 6 we specify our econometric model of the determining factors (a) of overall KTT activities as well as five specific forms of KTT activities, (b) of three channels of KTT (patenting, licensing, founding of spin-offs) and describe the construction of the variables. Section 7 is dealing with the empirical results. Finally, Section 8 contains some conclusions and a summary.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

To our knowledge there is little theoretical research on the financial incentives facing faculty and the allocation of effort across types of research (see the discussion in Thursby et al., 2005). Beath et al. (2003) and Jensen and Thursby (2004) study faculty research incentives in the framework of a principal agent model where the university is the principal and the faculty member is the agent. The analysis in Beath et al. (2003) is static and investigates the potential for the university to

Review of selected empirical literature

In this section we review some selected empirical studies which use a similar approach to ours (university-level or (department-) institute-level data, econometric investigation of the determinants of some form of KTT activities) and try to detect some regularities. Most studies refer to various channels of KTT such as patenting, licensing and the founding of new firms.

Data

The data used in this study were collected in the course of a survey among Swiss research institutes using a questionnaire which included questions on the incidence of KTT activities among institutes or departments of Swiss science institutions (federal institutes of technology, federal research organizations, cantonal Universities and universities of applied sciences), forms, channels, motives and impediments of the KTT activities of Swiss science institutions as well on some basic institute

Incidence of KTT activities

According to the results in Table 1 84.2% of the responding institutes or departments were involved in KTT activities with private enterprises in the period 2002–2004, 71.4% of respondents reported also KTT activities with foreign firms. 94.1% of KTT-active institutes co-operate with European firms, 48.2% with American and 18.2% with Japanese firms. There are not significant differences among the various types of institutions (federal institutes of technology, federal research institutions,

Dependent variables

We specified two different econometric models. First, we specified model A for the determinants of overall KTT activities. The dependent variable (KTT) was a binary variable which was defined as follows: knowledge and technology transfer activities in the period 2002–2004 yes/no. Model A refers to all institutes in the sample. Second, we specified model B for the determinants of (a) five specific forms of KTT activities and (b) three channels KTT. For model B only KTT-active institutes were

Overall KTT activities (model A)

Table 5 contains the results of the probit estimates for the variable for overall KTT activities (KTT; model A). For the coefficients of the variables APPL, TEACH and FINANCE we obtain the expected signs (column 1 in Table 5). Institutes with a stronger orientation to applied research and/or lower teaching obligations are also stronger inclined to get involved in KTT activities. The same is valid for institutes which have already had experience with business sector co-operations as reflected by

Summary and conclusions

A new element that this paper adds to empirical literature is the analysis at the level of institute or department of a wide spectrum of KTTT activities covering besides research co-operation also informal informational contacts, educational activities, consulting and joint use of technical infrastructure. Thus, it is understandable that no other comparable empirical study could be found for this part of the study with the exception of the paper of Schartinger et al. (2001) in this journal.

A

Acknowledgements

This study was financially supported by the ETH-Board. The authors acknowledge gratefully the fruitful comments and suggestions of two anonymous referees.

References (39)

  • Azoulay, P., Ding, W., Stuart, T., 2005. The Determinants of Faculty Patenting Behaviour: Demographics or...
  • Berwert, A., Rütter, H., Künzle, D. Lüthi, E., Leu, A., 2002. THISS – Technische Hochschulen und Innovationen:...
  • B. Carlsson et al.

    Technology transfer in United States Universities

    Journal of Evolutionary Economics

    (2002)
  • J. Friedman et al.

    University technology transfer: do incentives, management, and location matter?

    Journal of Technology Transfer

    (2003)
  • E. Geissler

    Intersector technology co-operation: hard myths, soft facts

    Technovation

    (1997)
  • E. Geisler et al.

    University-industry relations: a review of major issues

  • W.H. Greene

    Econometric Analysis

    (2003)
  • Hellman, T., 2005. The Role of Patents for Bridging the Science to Market Gap. NBER Working Paper No. 11460, Cambridge,...
  • Jensen, R., Thursby, M., 2004. The Academic Effects of Patentable Research. NBER Working Paper No. 10758, Cambridge,...
  • Cited by (204)

    • The role of public external knowledge for firm innovativeness

      2024, International Journal of Industrial Organization
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    1

    Present address: Zuercher Kantonalbank, CH-8005 Zurich, Switzerland. Tel.: +41 44 632 47 65; fax: +41 44 632 13 52.

    2

    Tel.: +41 44 632 51 51; fax: +41 44 632 13 52.

    View full text